The Five Greatest Warriors by Matthew Reilly

Every so often, I just want to escape into a book and be swept up in the action. Every so often, I just want to be a spectator as an adventure unfolds. I’m finding that Matthew Reilly’s books are perfect for this. I find them fun!

In ‘The Five Greatest Warriors’ Jack West Jr and his team are (still) on a quest to save the world. And this quest will involve a lot of travel and plenty of action. They discover a rhyme about five mysterious but unnamed warriors. Each of these figures provides a key to knowledge which is required to follow the steps necessary to save the world. But, Jack West Jr and his team are not the only ones seeking this information, and not everyone wants to save the world. Time is running out.

Can Jack West Jr and his team prevail?

I’m reading these books out of order (I’ve yet to read ‘Seven Deadly Wonders’ and ‘The Six Sacred Stones’, I started with ‘The Four Legendary Kingdoms’) so I’m not (yet) across all of the finer detail of Jack West Jr’s backstory, but it really hasn’t affected my enjoyment of this book. The story is so outrageous, so action-packed, so full of loathsome villains and likeable heroes that it creates its own escapist momentum. It’s unbelievable, but so much fun. Just when I think that all is lost, Mr Reilly introduces another unbelievable twist, another highly improbable turn. My advice is: don’t try to work it out, don’t try to even think about what is possible, just enjoy the trip. If you need your fiction grounded in reality, then the Jack West Jr series is probably not for you. Me, I’ll continue to work backwards. And by the time I’ve read the first two books in this series, maybe the fifth one will be available? I hope so.